Soon, we will be able to answer the important question: “Can these tiny micro-blowers successfully blow air?”

Quote

If the micro-blowers pump a net amount of air, and if an increase in pressure is measured at the output, then we know we have built working blowers and will have proven our basic micro-blower concept.

Their original "story" was:

Quote

we need your help to get it out of the lab and into your hands

Which implies they had already done this proof of concept work in the lab, and just needed funding to finalise a design and work towards mass production.So it was just a concept design with no serious technical or scientific research behind it. i.e. more IGG vaporware!

Which implies they had already done this proof of concept work in the lab, and just needed funding to finalise a design and work towards mass production.So it was just a concept design with no serious technical or scientific research behind it. i.e. more IGG vaporware!

Yes this was one of the main critiques from the initial crowd-funding campaign, that they had absolutely no working prototype and just some cockamamie ideas that fed on the desperation of people with a horrible medical condition. Yet they were providing supporters with vouchers for a product that they haven't even proved is at all possible. That's why they went to IGG and not Kickstarter.

According to Airing, they fulfilled the campaign... They delivered vouchers to people. Correct? So technically their obligation is complete. People bought "vouchers" for free Airings, if and when they exist. See how clever Stephen Marsh and his group of experts is? Meanwhile they have $1,000,000+ to mess around with for a number of years to keep themselves busy and maybe invent something actually useful. Let's hope they don't keep stringing everyone along year after year, well past their original delivery deadline and hope for backer atrophy and apathy to shed people off their backs.

For the sake of these sufferers who spent their hard-earned cash on a promise of a miracle device, let's hope Stephen Marsh actually truly believes he is on to something and not a pathological liar who has even convinced himself it can be done and is self-deluded. Then again, all entrepreneurs and visionaries must have a certain element of this psychological attribute to persevere in the face of overwhelming odds... but if you are using other people's money to do it, you had better be more responsible.

The nostril to the lung passageway can be approximated to a 9mm ID diameter tube and approximately 17cm long, to give adequate airflow for a large male (length based off my own nose to ear length)Based off the google book "Nurse's 5-minute Clinical Consult: Procedures" This comes to a volume of 43mL to me,

For the lungs, with a person fully at rest needs about 7.5L per minute to stay alive, with an average tidal volume of 500mL. Timing my own deep breathing rate, its about 4 seconds per inhale, however i am big and the minimum would put my tidal amount closer to 1L, so a flowrate of 15L per minute on the fan,

Now that is where i run out of approximations i can make, but hopefully that can give someone some ideas on what is possible with those numbers, Pressurize a 43mL volume to 1KPa 8 times a minute and have a flow rate exceeding 15L/ Minute when unobstructed, (keeping such a high flow rate would exceed the rate i breath in, and thus keep a net positive pressure in my head)

For a data point, my CPAP is set for 10 inches H2O pressure, which is about 2.5 kilopascals if some random unit converter I found on the internet is to be trusted. I don't know if that's typical, high, or low. The pressure setting isn't arbitrary. It was determined in a sleep study to be the pressure necessary to be medically effective in pressurizing my fat head.

For a data point, my CPAP is set for 10 inches H2O pressure, which is about 2.5 kilopascals if some random unit converter I found on the internet is to be trusted. I don't know if that's typical, high, or low. The pressure setting isn't arbitrary. It was determined in a sleep study to be the pressure necessary to be medically effective in pressurizing my fat head.

I suspect you mean 10 cm not inches. 10-15 cm is typical. I'd say 10 cm is the most common number I see.

You are absolutely right that titration to the correct value requires a sleep study.

I'm pretty sure there is a reason why a CPAP machine has to be the size it is, given it is so hated to have a mask strapped on to your face all night and have this noise. The companies who make them would have loved to make them smaller if it was possible, and there are many ways to make them smaller even using existing blower-fan technology. Reasons I can think of why it is difficult to miniaturize:

1. the pressure needs to be sufficient to open the obstruction2. the air must be humidified3. the appliance has to be attached to your head or it will slip out due to it's own pressure4. it must allow for exhalation without falling off5. there must be sufficient power to run it all night

Just as a "proof of concept" what Airing LLC should have done from the start is simply take one of their blue rubbery nose-pieces (which they have made) and rig in a couple of small tubes hooked up to a conventional blower and see what kind of power and flow is required.

Instead, they have dreamt up this "micro-blower" nano-technology which has never been created before and they have absolutely no way to know if it even works.

My guess is, Stephen Marsh, the "inventor" of this stuff (someone who has also had a number of issues on previous Venture Capitalist technological startups which ended up in court cases... just read the earlier posts in this thread) wanted to get enough money to test out his nano-tech micro-blower concept and created a "killer-application" for it in order to get enough interest to get funded. If he had said he wanted to invent micro-blowers to cool your PC chip, nobody would have bothered giving him any money. But CPAP was a noble and worthy cause, and so he latched on to that idea and sold everyone on the idea.

Let us suppose for a minute that he manages to get these micro-blowers to actually work. They may not be useful for CPAP but may come in handy for other applications. He may spin those off to another company, sell off the intellectual property or license it out. Who knows. But it is a HUGE LEAP OF FAITH for these $1,000,000+ backing community to take on the word of a couple of people who think it should technically work.

Why does Stephen Marsh and the Airing especially bother me? It hits close to home... My father uses a CPAP and my son actually needed to wear a CPAP for a few months when he was an infant (it was not a good feeling to put one of these machines on your baby every night and try to have him sleep comfortably).

I'm a medically trained professional and small business owner who had to borrow a huge amount of money to start up my office. I didn't crowd-fund the funds, I put it all on my back. Every business is a risk but I am personally accountable and because of that had to work hard and through many sleepless nights to ensure I didn't lose the shirt off my back.

Now you have Stephen Marsh and his group of experts, all fairly well-to-do professionals who could have obtained the money through loans and feel some accountability. Instead, they used crowd-funding for a number of different reasons to shield themselves in case things go sour. The idea sounded far-fetched from the beginning and it still is nowhere closer to being proven to work today than it was when they obtained their crowd-funding at 896% over-funded on July 16, 2015 (about 8 months ago).

We've already seen an update where Stephen Marsh admits it will take another $7,000,000 or so to actually make the prototypes. Where he gets these numbers I have no idea, but to imagine then their original target was $100,000? They managed to get $896,000 in their campaign time and then continued "InDemand" funding and now up over $1.2 million.... and Stephen Marsh admits he can't get the project finished without another $7,000,000.....

I would be the first one to applaud Marsh and his team if they can pull this off. I'll keep watching...

But we see so many other similar campaigns and you can't help but think this is in the same class as Skarp, uBeam, Batteriser... same scientific shenanigans and lack of functioning prototypes, hyperbole-filled rhetoric and raised huge amounts of money with nothing to show for it.

For a data point, my CPAP is set for 10 inches H2O pressure, which is about 2.5 kilopascals if some random unit converter I found on the internet is to be trusted. I don't know if that's typical, high, or low. The pressure setting isn't arbitrary. It was determined in a sleep study to be the pressure necessary to be medically effective in pressurizing my fat head.

Mines at 10cm too, and let's not forget the energy needed for the monitor system to ensure constant pressure during exhalation and inhalation.

I think I will stick with the light weight mask I use now, I don't fancy a couple of tubes with barbs hanging onto the inside of my nostrils all night

Last year (I read the whole damn thread) someone mentioned about air blowing out your mouth, sleeping with your mouth closed is easy with practice even speaking with air blowing into your nose is a simple process once you have a few goes

Logged

Magic smoke detector Out of Order, please switch on with extreme caution.

I see nothing but a dog and pony show to please backers. Why are the guys in the lab wearing disposable medical scrubs? No substantial evidence that anything is working. Even the Skarp laser razor, while horribly inefficient and fragile, did at least show hair being cut. Airing doesn't even show a micro blower (working or otherwise).

They have over $1 million and have been working on it for 8-9 months presumably. Patents should be pending. They can't show the world anything?